


I Spun You Gold

by folie_a_yeux



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Manipulative Hannibal, On the Run, POV Multiple, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 10:11:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5123732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folie_a_yeux/pseuds/folie_a_yeux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is three years to the day when the first package arrives.</p><p>Homer is almost seven by then, shins and elbows everywhere, youthful pudge melting away to match the bones in his cheeks, the sharpness of his eyes. But he’s still young enough to forget himself, in front of his parents, and rip the plain brown packaging to shreds, fingers slicing right through the beautiful, jet black writing on the front. Their address. His name.</p><p>Alana wants to tear the parcel from his hands.</p><p>Prompt: What if Hannibal started sending Alana gifts?</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Spun You Gold

_2018._

It is three years to the day when the first package arrives.

Homer is almost seven by then, shins and elbows everywhere, youthful pudge melting away to match the bones in his cheeks, the sharpness of his eyes. But he’s still young enough to forget himself, in front of his parents, and rip the plain brown packaging to shreds, fingers slicing right through the beautiful, jet black writing on the front. Their address. His name.

Alana wants to tear the parcel from his hands.

She would have burned it, if she’d gotten to it first. She will tell herself, later, that she recognized his handwriting. She will try to forget that she smelled him, remembered him, long before she saw the smooth, clean letters.

She will try to forget. She will not be able to.

So instead, she lifts Homer into her arms, like she did when he was a baby captivated by the dancing gold of earrings she kept out of his reach. She brings him to the couch where Margot sprawls, the morning paper spread over the cushions. _It’s a book_ , he says, voice trembling with excitement. She sees the heavy leather cover, the gilt embossing, the pen and ink illustrations, the harsh German of the script. Alana has been teaching Homer German for two years now.

She has tried to be a good mother.

She has tried not to succumb to professional curiosity, to look first and always for the anomaly or defect. She knows Margot’s eyes will search that out. So she holds to the moorings of statistics she no longer believes in, ticking off numbers and responses to counter the worry that gnaws at the back of Margot’s neck, that spills hot breath in the corners of her mind. Mason’s son. A Verger son.

Even if he were a monster, she would not be able to help loving him.

All he is. Is a boy. A boy now captivated by drawings of wolves and spindles, stories of gnarled pathways and blood-red sheets. Alana can feel Margot’s eyes on her, and sets her face to a careful blank, grateful her lipstick allows her this temporary mask, that she can look like she’s smiling when her heart is frozen.

She reaches for Margot, now, bringing Homer into the cradle of their stomachs and thighs. He squirms, but tucks his legs between them, letting his mothers look over his hunched shoulders.

Alana runs the ends of her fingertips up Margot’s arm, tracing to the ridge of her collarbone. Her fingers catch in Margot’s hair, snaring the soft dry warmth against her nails, and senses one skipped beat, one jagged memory catching in Margot’s throat, before the breath relaxes, the head tips back into the weight of Alana’s palm, and her wife opens herself, trusting Alana not to do what other hands had done so many times before.

Alana thinks: _I have never known anyone as brave as you._

_2021._

Alana thinks she doesn’t know about the packages.

But Margot has made it her business to know when Alana is upset. She’s made it her life to know the reasons why.

A book of Grimm’s fairy tales, for Homer. A fur-lined coat, the year Margot’s was ruined. And then, the cruelest month: A homemade set of fishing lures.

Margot knows Jack Crawford would be alarmed by their coming. Would read the packages as a warning, a sign of something. Just like a man, really. To read an object as only one thing or another.

She had long since learned to read the haze around an object’s weight. To sense its pulse and the shimmer it held as it passed from eye to eye. When she was a little girl, she would creep into the kitchen at night, head full of gingerbread and watchtowers, and stare at the oven. Fix on the stain where the pie was cooked. Is that what the witch’s oven looked like? Is that my flesh, gelling on the stove?

She never understood how people could look at objects and see one purpose, innocuous or threatening, stolid and static.

An oven. A blade of grass. A piece of chocolate, melting in the sun.

Sometimes, when Homer is late coming home from school, Margot feels the breath hitch in her throat. She can count them. Stabs radiating to her abdomen. From the moment he should come home to the moment he walks through the door.

But most days, Margot simply breathes. She luxuriates in the warmth of the family she’s created. The home she’s carved from years and bones and bread. She helps Homer with the literature he lugs home each day; she helps cook as Alana teaches him algebra and grammar, listening to the smooth murmur of her voice over the bubbling on the stove, the scratching of her son’s pencil.

One day, soon, Margot will come home from the factory and see Alana in the entryway. There will be the remnants of a package at her feet. Her coat will be unbuttoned, a scarf knotted at her neck like a velvet wound. She will be holding the necklace in her hand, a thin chain of gold shivering to a single garnet stone. Margot will think of another necklace, with a starfish at the end, that every old picture of Alana has her wearing. That Alana never wears.

She will say Alana’s name. Her wife will place the necklace, carefully, back in its bag. She will take Margot into her arms. She will whisper something in the French that Margot doesn’t speak. She will bury her lips in the rough curls of her lover’s hair.

Margot thinks: _I will never know anyone as strong as you._

 

_2025._

The packages come like clockwork now. Alana can hear them clicking, each cog slipping into place, an anniversary she can longer place, a reminder she can never forget.

She doesn’t doubt that he will come, eventually. It would fit his humor, a humor Alana tunes like the strings of the harpsichord she no longer plays. But she no longer has the immediate, choking fear of someone who believes cold flesh is the only way to die.

She loves this flesh of hers. As much as she loves the one pressed against her now, sweat beading at the gap between Margot’s breasts, her thick lashes, the crease of her burning thighs. Almost as much as she loves the flesh and blood and bone of the son whose pulse she is bound to, whose little breaths and fitful dreams stir her from the space between sleep and waking.

But it is not her skin covering this flesh. Not anymore. It is his.

She can still hear Chilton’s mocking. She feels it in the gooseflesh that pimples her arms when it rains, in the crack of thunder that sends her nerves blazing in the silence of a dark room.

She will never wear the necklace he sent. She doesn’t have to.

She understands, now. She knows that Alana Bloom, the Alana with flowers under her skin and sun in her hair, died in Hannibal’s kitchen. Not when she failed to kill the monster. The moment she took a breath. The moment she pulled the trigger on her gun.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to salvage, for keeping me from unintentionally describing Homer Verger as a snake.


End file.
